The Indiana University assistant professor discusses her 2011 NIH New Innovator Award project that seeks to identify natural antibacterial agents for drug development.

In September, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) presented 50 New
Innovator Awards to support creative investigators with innovative research
ideas at an early stage of their careers. The program’s goal is to lower the
barrier of preliminary data, which is required in the traditional NIH peer
review, and support research that could have a high impact. To learn more
about their progressive research, BioTechniques spoke with several of
this year’s recipients in a series of profiles that will be published this
week.

------------

“Research and history shows that natural products are better source materials for developing antibiotic compounds. They’ve been shied away from, but it’s clear they hold the most power for developing new drugs,” says Carlson. Source: Indiana University

“All-natural” has become a popular marketing slogan, from beauty products to
your groceries. The concept behind this catchphrase is that because these
products use natural ingredients, they are better for your health. But when
it comes to antibacterial agents, researchers in the last few decades have
primarily focused on synthetic compounds because nature is sometimes
difficult to work with. Erin Carlson is hoping to challenge that tradition.

“Research and history shows that natural products are better source materials
for developing antibiotic compounds. They’ve been shied away from, but it’s
clear they hold the most power for developing new drugs,” says Carlson.

As an assistant professor of chemistry at Indiana University, Carlson’s
research focuses on the identification of natural antibacterial agents and
their effectiveness for drug-resistant infections. The goal is to develop
drugs discovered in natural plants and microorganisms.

Currently, Carlson and graduate student Darci Trader are developing methods to
isolate natural products. Traditional techniques extract and separate
biological compounds based on characteristics such as size or charge, but
Carlson’s team hopes to identify compounds in biological samples based on
their functional group composition.

“We are working to develop new techniques for isolation and then strategies
for trying to create even more effective drugs from natural products by
conjugating or adding a number of structures to known drugs to try to
amplify the activities the compound has,” says Carlson.

Specifically, they are targeting functional groups like the hydroxyl and the
carboxylic acid in naturally-derived compounds. These hydroxyl functional
groups are present in more than 70% of natural products and isolating them
will be the first step toward the development of drugs from natural
products. To isolate these compounds, Carlson’s team has created an
enrichment tag based up a silyl-functionalized resin to enrich molecules
based on their functional group composition (1).

But her research has only reached technology development stage. Her group has
not found or identified natural compounds with antibiotic properties yet.

In the six years since she received her Ph.D. from the University of
Wisconsin, Carlson’s career has been supported by several organizations. In
2005, she received an American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellowship. In
2007, Carlson received an NIH Pathway to Independence Award. Last year, the
Pew Charitable Trusts named her a Pew Scholar. And now, she has received the
2011 NIH New Innovator Award.

“I am not surprised in the least by her success so far as a faculty member at
Indiana,” says Benjamin Cravatt, a professor at the Skaggs Institute for
Chemical Biology who mentored Carlson. “In a very short time, she has
established an innovative research program that addresses a very challenging
scientific problem, namely, the functional enrichment and characterization
of low-abundance, bioactive natural products.”

Furthermore, Carlson’s group hopes that some of these new natural products
will target different pathways in bacteria that cause infectious disease.
Current drugs only attack a limited numbers of pathways, and bacteria
readily develop some resistance to these drugs.

“A major challenge is that drug discovery is very complex and a lot of it is
based on serendipity, whether or not you find the compounds that give the
appropriate activities you’re interested in. Our strategy is develop
techniques that allow us to use both known compounds and unknown compounds
and decrease the risk by screening for some properties that we know should
be advantageous while at the same time discovering new, more effective
activities,” Carlson says.